Guanxi by Robert Buderi & Gregory T. Huang

Author:Robert Buderi & Gregory T. Huang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks
Published: 2006-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

In the first few months following the Zhuhai retreat, Ya-Qin and his top aides worked to refine the idea, though they were slowed by the U.S. holidays and Chinese New Year. It was a bit tricky, asking to create a new organization. Says Hong Jiang Zhang, “This is something that came from bottom up. We never did this before, and Microsoft is very conservative on company projects. When you ask for headcount and out-of-plan growth [not approved in the annual budget], you have to put a good story together.”

Their story, though, encompassing the history of the lab’s tech transfer efforts, almost wrote itself. Since it typically takes several years for research projects to yield anything worth commercializing, moving innovations to development (while an important part of Kai-Fu Lee’s long-term vision) was hardly a top priority when the lab formed in 1998. Early on, a group was set up to help researchers build demos for showing concept technologies to the business divisions and Redmond research colleagues, with two engineers or programmers assigned to each of about a dozen projects. But as the lab grew and its technologies became serious contenders for product development, it became clear that while two engineers or programmers might be fine for one project, another might require five or more staff to handle the extensive refinement needed to verify that a one-of-a-kind research prototype could be scaled up for mass production.

The initial solution, in late 2001, was to form a centralized, more flexible organization dedicated to technology transfer. Rather than being assigned to specific lab projects, the roughly 25 developers in the newly configured group went where they were needed—in the numbers needed.

Heading the group was Bin Lin, an experienced engineer who had joined the lab in mid-2000 after five years in Redmond development groups: Lin displayed a stack of “Ship It” awards in his office, signifying his extensive track record contributing to Microsoft products. The new group was right for that period of the lab’s growth, he says. But even with some developers working on more than one assignment, his team could only handle about thirty projects at a time. As time went on, he says, “The research lab was growing so big and so huge, this thirty projects was only a small number of what was available. I was only able to cover the projects that had the most active and short-term need for tech transfer. And that was the bottleneck.”

There was no way the product groups in Redmond were going to pick up the slack. It wasn’t just the geographic distance that made it so difficult, it was the nature of R&D. When researchers are ready to hand off an invention or new piece of code to product developers, a lot of refinement and testing is needed to get it ready for commercial release—and product developers aren’t always able to do it. They often have their hands full with more pressing jobs such as upgrading conventional features or improving security. And even a great

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.